Sisters' Stories

The National Catholic Reporter has received a letter of support addressed to Catholic nuns, signed by 34 organizations representing Protestant women from New York to Austin, Texas. Cynthia Rigby, one supporter who helped gather signatures, said it was meant not as a petition, but as a theological letter.

“It was so important to us that this reflect a collective voice,” said Rigby, a theology professor at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, “because, theologically, we believe that communities of Christian believers, in this case communities of sisters in Christ, stand together.”

Rigby, who said the initiative was started by the Advocacy Committee for Women’s Concerns, and the signatures collected in about five days, said she hopes Catholic sisters will see it and feel encouraged.

In a low-profile visit to the San Francisco Bay Area, Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and much in the news in recent days for his congregation's April 18 decree calling for reform of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, was the homilist Monday at the Mass marking the 50th year of the ordination of his good friend, San Francisco's Archbishop George Niederauer.

Niederauer succeeded Levada as San Francisco archbishop in 2006.

According to Catholic San Francisco, more than 2,000 attended the Mass of thanksgiving at St. Mary's Cathedral including 13 other bishops and 130 priests.

CHICAGO -- If the founders of Mary’s Pence thought women’s gifts would be more valued by the Catholic church a quarter century later, the Vatican’s recent ordering of the reform of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) was hardly evidence of such improvement.

Some of our bishops are acting like bullies, abusing the authority of their offices in the name of enforcing orthodoxy. Dealing with U.S. women religious, these bishops' actions appear governed more by a desire to enforce obedience than to develop fidelity in our sisters. Catholics see through this guise. They are upset, fed up with the likes of this behavior. They are speaking out. Soon they will be on the streets making their voices heard. You can count on it.

In a recent example of “do what I say, not what I do,” the U.S. Catholic bishops announced their “great national campaign” for religious freedom in the United States while at the same time assisting in the Vatican takeover of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. LCWR represents more than 80 percent of U.S. women in religious life and is alleged to have,well, too much conscience, although that is not what the bishops call it.

Calling the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's current reform directive for the Leadership Conference of Women Religious a “fiasco” and accusing the CDF of “bully” tactics, an April 27 opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle charges that “church leaders refuse to dialogue” and that it “is becoming increasingly obvious to many Catholics that these 'men only' club members are not in control, are not relevant and have lost their moral authority.”

Tilted “U.S. nuns group deserves support,” the commentary is written by Brian Cahill, the retired executive director of San Francisco Catholic Charities who served in that post when now-Cardinal William Levada was archbishop there. Levada heads the CDF.

Problems with official church authority have plagued women religious for centuries. I offer here two vivid examples I wrote about in my book, Faithful Dissenters: Men and Women Who Loved and Changed the Church.

Mother Théodore Guérin and five other members of the Sisters of Providence sailed from France in the early 1840s and arrived in southwest Indiana to start a school for girls. The wilderness of the area was a challenge, as was learning a new language. But those were minor compared to the interference and antagonism they encountered in the person of the Vincennes bishop, Célestine de la Hailandière. Nevertheless, she and her community were able to open a boarding school near St. Mary-of-the-Woods. From the start, the bishop refused to approve the sisters religious rule and on one occasion called for the election of a new superior to replace Guérin, but the community re-elected her anyway.

Regular readers of my blog will know the very, very low regard in which I hold the opinions of George Weigel. He and his neo-con fellow RCs have tried to subvert Catholic social teaching for decades and still seem incapable of believing that the Master meant what he said about avarice and riches.

Now, he has set his sights on the Vatican's "assessment" of the LCWR in a post at the National Review. The article is filled with his usual absurd arguments - if only nuns wore habits, all would be well with the world - and his usualy penchant for nostalgia - invoking the memory of Ingrid Bergman in Bells of St. Mary's - but this paragraph of his was especially disturbing even by Weigel's standards:

I did not have the visceral reaction many of my colleagues had to the news of the “assessment” of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. That was, until I read the document itself. But, before we get to the text, I have to ask myself: Why did I not instantly recognize the injustice many of my friends discerned?

In part, I have learned to resist overbroad interpretations of events that fit neatly with a previously determined meta-narrative, in this case the meta-narrative that sees the bad, old, meanies at the Vatican going after unsuspecting Catholics. I do not recall cries of “injustice” when the Vatican, in 2000, appointed an apostolic visitor to Mother Angelica’s abbey, although that too involved men assessing women, the far away Vatican bureaucrats ordering U.S.-based women religious to open themselves to investigation and, in the event, resulted in the removal of Mother Angelica from the leadership of her abbey.